The risks of knowledge: investigations into the death of the Hon. Minister John Robert Ouko in Kenya, 1990, by David William Cohen and E.S. Atieno Odhiambo, Athens, Ohio, Ohio University Press, 2004, 344 pp., £24.50 (paperback), ISBN 978-0821415986
The central focus of this book is the divide between the official or State-sponsored search for the truth and public or citizen perceptions of the same, in a defining moment in Kenya's political history: the murder in February 1990 of Foreign Minister Dr Robert Ouko. Any student of African politics will be keen to read this context-specific analysis of events and processes which resonate with core themes of broader interest – ethno-national competitive politics and political economies, and substantial challenges to and contestations over democratic space. This book fundamentally illustrates the widespread if not universal acknowledgement that the macabre killing of Robert Ouko was not fully addressed to the (legal) satisfaction of a public already overwhelmed by numerous conspiracy theories on the matter: this is a saga which has had no closure. As the book documents, Ouko's death was debated in various public galleries, commissions of inquiry, parliamentary debates, and village meetings, but nevertheless there remained a gap in the analytical and scholastic treatises about the event and its definitive consequences for Kenya.
The book's content is wide ranging: there is a focus on social histories, the state as a custodian of the truth, narratives of corruption, a close analysis of the actual murder, as well as critical theoretical reflection on broader questions of epistemology. Though complex, this approach is logically convincing to the reader given the international resonance of the subject matter – for example in relation to similar events that have occurred in Latin America. Cohen and Odhiambo provide a new angle to the story by subjecting every possible public source to probing scrutiny. They go further to explore what the Ouko murder mystery really meant to Kenya and to the outside world, in terms of the implications for the new democratic paradigm that gradually followed the re-introduction in 1992 of multi-party politics, through to the post-Moi succession politics. The remarkable but slow changes that came to Kenya even within the context of the state-supervised official inquiry into Ouko's death are discussed, and subsequent debates over political reform are analysed, though not at great length. This is because the core objective of the book is to present a setting for exploring multiple processes of knowledge production in post-colonial Kenya, and the role of the state in this process. This work argues well that the epistemology of the Ouko case is produced, owned, and shared informally by various parties or actors in the Kenyan public. The book fails to note how significantly the reproduction of this knowledge especially by the state only further compounds the dilemma of who is the custodian of truth, especially given the risks that many players endured in the Ouko death saga.
Cohen and Odhiambo openly challenge the idea that historically, the public in Kenya were not able to define their knowledge of the moment, or that they were unable to assess the moment from media and court transcripts. They reveal how a process and narrative of discovery was achieved within a series of related moments: Ouko's death and the discovery of his body; the unilateral fight against corruption that he quietly oversaw; and the management of the truth by the state and other agencies involved at the centre or the margins of the Ouko death dilemma. This wide-ranging inquiry briefly gives a scope to another type of risk of knowledge even before the Minister's death. His documentation of official corruption was risky business in the complex pyramid of the Kenyan political landscape – then consisting of a very autocratic one-party state centred on the highly personalised power of the presidency.
The production of knowledge by the state and state officials like Ouko is addressed in the book in terms of the dynamic experiences of the Kenyan public and, to an extent, the broader publics of other African governments and citizenries. The analysis is by no means comprehensive in scope, though, and perhaps this is in itself a manifestation of enduring risks of knowledge production. For example, an in-depth focus on the case of transnational corruption in the Molasses Plant in Kenya as seen by Ouko is not provided – perhaps this would have slightly diverted from the book's agenda of determining the production of knowledge in the government, public and personal spheres. Cohen and Odhiambo are less incisive – in fact deliberately so – in not risking their own discourse on the subject seemingly because the Ouko case has really had no official and public closure. They have attempted to use quite a representative and fairly sufficient literature review given the scarcity of writings on the former politician other than media reports.
Their analysis follows the substantive moments in the search for knowledge, when the truth is really at a major risk of being squandered by the centres of power, by state securocrats in their opposition to the periphery – to traditions and customs of informal but well informed and sometimes biased actors. All this dramaturgy as contained in the book takes place in different scenes: in court rooms, presidential quarters, rural farms, public highways, in the murky worlds of international business, the mortuary, the Kenyan parliament. This multi-sited approach enables Cohen and Odhiambo to address the dialectics of rumours without being dismissive about the sources, instead assessing the transcripts and sometimes unfinished accounts of even the less schooled actors that played a role in the unfinished business that was the unrelenting posthumous dilemma of the question, who killed Kenya's possible future candidate for the presidency?
The dramaturgy in The risks of knowledge is essentially deep in every possible context of the word. Too many narratives and counter-narratives unfold, of multiple scenes, places and people – but that is the true essence of the Ouko murder case.